Stuff

Tonight’s YouGov poll for the Sun has topline figures of CON 34%, LAB 42%, LD 9%, UKIP 6%. It looking very much as if the Olympics have passed without any meaningful impact on voting intention figures.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that there was intelligence and establishment led opposition to a Labour government. Even rumours about Harold Wislon being forced to quit. Paranoia? I suppose it depends upon which side you were on.

But rather like today, there really weren’t any easy answers to the economic problems. I wonder what would have happened if Callaghan had won in 1979?

George Kennedy Young and Airey Neave (both of the Monday Club and Tory Action) are two names who were very much at the interface of politics and the intelligence community in the years when there was constant talk of plots against Wilson, the “virtually socialist” Heath, and any number of other political figures. Both were also heavily involved disinformation campaigns.

I think the security services were worried about Heath’s sexuality and his potential vulnerability to blackmail. The presumption in those days was that if you were a bachelor in middle age then you must be gay. Heath wrestled with this stigma all his adult political life and it caused him some problems within the Conservative Party.

Talking of espionage, wasn’t it ironic that the latest MP unmasked as someone who was actually spying for the Communists in the febrile days of the Cold War turned out to be a Tory MP, Raymond Mawby.

Mawby provided information to Czech spies for a decade, including details about colleagues in Parliament. It wasn’t ideology that motivated him, apparently, but a need for money to clear his gambling debts!

Stonehouse and Mawby had more things in common than just their predilection for helping the Czech Government in the 1960s because they both served as Postmaster Generals in the Home and Wilson governments respectively. The post had a grand title, but was essentially a junior ministerial role, although it obviously gave them both some privileged access to highly confidential information.

Mawby’s motivation was clearly money, while Stonehouse’s reasons were a little more to difficult to fathom. They may have been part ideological but were more likely to have been linked to his rather colourful private life. Of course, he entered national infamy when he stole the name of a dead constituent in Walsall and then faked his own death, a la Reginald Perrin, hoping to escape the clutches of the pursuing law enforcement authorities and then establish a new life, many miles away, with his much younger mistress. He resurfaced in Australia but was eventually run to ground.

MIKEMS
Back to development aid and the reduction of world poverty, I think you have, as with EU agricultural subsidies, to be in this game to understand it, but that it is potentially an explosive factor in VI.
I agree with van Gelder’s Ghost of 0.7″ assessment reported in the DT 28 April 2010: “0.7 per cent was dreamt up as a campaigning tool in the 1960s. It is forty years out of date, and based on “financing gap theory”, an idea which has since lost all credibility. Worst of all, when you take the campaigners’ model and recalculate it with updated economic figures, the results now suggest that we should, at best, give a grant of 0.05 per cent of GDP – less than a tenth of the aid we are already spending.
Yet this is a policy pushed by rock stars and lobby groups, not economists. Bob Geldof said it was “a rare and wonderful thing”; Bono called the proposal “transformative”. And we know how Nick, Dave and Gordon enjoy basking in the fuzzy warmth of celebrity endorsements. But 0.7 per cent never made sense, and in serious times it is an absurd idea.”
That the budget for aid in a context of widening wealth and land disparity in the ldc’s, the entrenchment of a generation of UN remittance men, ludicrous overspending on US militarily directed funding to Afghanistan without the option of buying up the opium crop, and a budget which exceeds that of the Home Office policing and anti-terrorist program, it is beyond time for a halt and a change of strategy
The question for me is whether EM and the Labour Party have the nous and courage to defy the cloudcuckooland 0.7 enacted into law by DC, before UKIP beat them to it.
On trade, though, think again: the maligned garment trade provides in Cambodia now jobs for over 400,000 under working conditions monitored by their own trade unions and under the scrutiny of US and EU leisure wear firms and ILO inspectors, and twice that number of workers in supplier industries. It ;provides remittances to about a quarter of the rural population. The industry has long since ceased to provide adequate employment and wages for a UK workforce, but is a vehicle for massive NS transfers of wealth to poor rural populations.